Reading Response for The Things They Carried

1. Why did Tim O’Brien write a book of fiction, but make the main character share the same name as him?

2. "He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay in the center of a red clay trail near the village of My Khe. His jaw was in his throat. His one eye was shut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole. I killed him" (O’Brien 180).

"…and as he passed me on the trail I threw a grenade that exploded at his feet and killed him" (O’Brien 131).

"’Daddy, the truth,’ Kathleen can say, ‘did you ever kill anybody?’ And I can say, honestly, ‘Of course not.’

Or I can say, honestly, ‘Yes’" (O’Brien 180).

Why did O’Brien repeat the story about the man he killed in Vietnam so many times, and why did the story change a little bit each time he told it?

I am confused about him repeating this story and how at different times how he says he did or did not kill this man. I believe the reasoning behind telling this story and its outcome so many times is to show an internal battle inside O’Brien in which he fights about if he was responsible for this man’s death. O’Brien manages to describe the man the same way in each recollection, unlike his recollection about if he killed the man. The reason for repeating this story multiple times is confusing to me, and the reason for doing so is not fully clear.

3. "This little field, I thought, had swallowed so much. My best friend. My pride. My belief in myself as a man of some small dignity and courage. Still, it was hard to find any real emotion. It simply wasn’t there. After that long night in the rain, I’d seemed to grow cold inside, all the illusions gone, all the old ambitions and hopes for myself sucked away into the mud. Over the years, that coldness had never entirely disappeared. There were times in my life when I couldn’t feel much, not sadness or pity or passion, and somehow I blamed this place for what I had become, and blamed it for taking away the person I had once been. For twenty years this field had embodied all the waste that was Vietnam, all the vulgarity and horror" (O’Brien 185).

O’Brien had many memories that haunted him from the swamp. The smell. Kiowa. This field held all of what he loathed about Vietnam. Vietnam changed his life. O’Brien feels he lost part of his life but also gained part of what he became from Vietnam, and it is symbolized through this passage about the field. The sick truth about war came out in that swamp. The memory of how he could have gotten that special honorable medal if he had rescued Kiowa in the field lingered in his mind forever.

This passage directly addresses the affect of O’Brien’s experiences in the swampy field. He made some big mistakes in that field, and those seemed to represent all of the atrocities and horrors of the war in Vietnam. The war became real in that field. The death. The brutality. The loss.

Literally, the remains from the war were embedded in the field, but so were the memories and mental images. This passage adequately displays a main theme of The Things They Carried, which is mental turmoil and questioning of oneself due to the war experience. O’Brien questions the path of his life and how the war affected it, as well as the empty feeling that war left inside of him. War pulls at every aspect of humans, including our emotions, mental limitations, physical abilities, and our boundaries of humanity and civilization. This passage shows how O’Brien was on his last thread and how he felt the war drained him of himself and his potential.

Work Cited

O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990.